WhatsApp could add support for Instagram Reels

While there’s no official date for Reels support to arrive on WhatsApp, this revelation comes less than three days after the company officially launched Facebook Reels in India, after testing it for a year.

Reels are a short video format created to compete with ByteDance’s viral app TikTok (Bloomberg)

Facebook has been working hard at bringing its three major messaging platforms to feature parity before it eventually makes them interoperable with each other as Mark Zuckerberg announced a few years ago. That process will involve making fundamental changes to both Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) to add support for end-to-end encryption.

It looks the company isn't just unifying message interoperability on the three platforms - it seems to be working on allowing users to view Instagram's Reels inside the WhatsApp app. Reels are a short video format created to compete with ByteDance's viral app TikTok. According to a tweet posted by popular WhatsApp feature leaker WABetaInfo, the company is working to allow Reels inside WhatsApp “in a future update”.

@WhatsApp is working on the possibility to play #Instagram Reels within WhatsApp, for a future update.

— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) March 11, 2021

While there's no official date for the Reels support to arrive on WhatsApp, this revelation comes less than three days after the company officially launched Facebook Reels in India, after testing it for a year. According to the company, Facebook Reels would (just like its Instagram counterpart) allow users to add music to their short videos, use effects, different camera modes and quickly edit video playback speed and other settings.

Facebook is also looking to monetise its Facebook stories even further, as we reported on Thursday. The company will show ads in the form of stickers inside content creators stories and give them a cut of the earnings. It will also allow more people to monetise their videos by lowering the minimum time from three minutes down to one minute. Instead of seeing ads at the 45-second mark, it looks like users will now see ads at the 30-second mark on shorter videos, according to the company.